Thanks for the update. I was getting paranoid about potential fraud. It looks like whoever put the arrows clearly messed up and confused people. At least people are on top of this potential problem.
Another AP article:
* Absentee voters in the state's most populous county are complaining about a ballot layout that they say might prompt some people to choose the wrong candidate, or none at all. The elections board in traditionally Democratic Cuyahoga County has fielded numerous calls from voters confused about the layout.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/10/20/politics1757EDT0729.DTL
"I was getting paranoid about potential fraud. It looks like whoever put the arrows clearly messed up and confused people."
Those look exactly like the absentee ballots we get here in Washington. Even the fonts look the same. The ballot would have worried me, too. Here, the choices have always, always, always been in numerical order. If Candidate A were number 4 and B were number 12, they would appear in that order on the written ballot. If I had gotten the ballot, I would have suspected that 4 was supposed to be 14; and the 2 above should have been 12. That would have been perfectly consistant with previous ballot organization.
What to do? Follow the letter of the instructions and take the chance that 14 was in fact the right chad to punch, or punch chad 14 on the assumpution that the 4 was a typo?
I probably would have done neither, and tried to call the Sec of State and get a clarification.